Links round-up: welcome to 2013!

Posted by Lashings of Ginger Beer Time

... and the Lashings blog returns from its festive break! We hope you've all had a lovely holiday season, no matter how you spent it.

Your Holiday Mom is a USA-based project that ran between Thanksgiving and New Year, where a group of mothers wrote/recorded a daily message to LGBTQ young people who aren't getting the support they need from their own parents.

It's now the time of year where dieting (among other forms of self-denial) is heavily encouraged by the social rituals of New Year's Resolutions: The Fat Nutritionist offers a brief but incisive reminder of the dangers of this, not only to health but to one's own sense of humanity. (For those new to The Fat Nutritionist, Cleopatra recently discovered her work via this article, which is an excellent discussion of common misconceptions around HAES, Fat Acceptance, obesity and the food industry.)

The latest Ask A Geek Feminist answer on being a better trans* ally is lovely.

Do not pass 'Go', do not collect £200, just go and read this blog post by Foz Meadows about how our beliefs about what is possible in the future (eg. sci fi and fantasy fiction) is shaped by our perceptions of what has happened in the past:

Almost uniformly, in fact, it seems as though such complaints of racial and sexual inaccuracy have nothing whatsoever to do with history and everything to do with a foggy, bastardised and ultimately inaccurate species of faux-knowledge gleaned primarily – if not exclusively – from homogeneous SFF, RPG settings, TV shows and Hollywood. And if that’s so, then no historic sensibilities are actually being affronted, because none genuinely exist: instead, it’s just a reflexive way of expressing either conscious or subconscious outrage that someone who isn’t white, straight and/or male is being given the spotlight.

One atheist writes about her disagreement with use of confrontational tactics in the atheist movement.

For anyone who enjoyed Jenni's post on the Friend Zone but felt a yearning for more sarcasm and MS Paint, The Singing Duck offers a hilarious deconstruction of how to 'get out of the friend zone' (content notice: misogyny and sexist stereotypes (reproduced in-text for analysis), cartoon representation of violence, and TW for a dismissive mention of rape allegations).

Jen Dziura at The Gloss questions the commonplace that "women are more emotional", examining how "emotional outbursts typically more associated with men (shouting, expressing anger openly) are given a pass in public discourse in a way that emotional outbursts typically more associated with women (crying, “getting upset”) are stigmatized."

On a final note of pure happiness, enjoy this gender-bending video of Ukrainian singer Artem Semenov singing both parts in Phantom Of The Opera.